Thanks to PBL pioneer
David Thornburg for alerting me to both today's release, and the significance,
of the Next
Generation Science Standards. The standards were developed by a consortium
of 23 states and organizations including the National Science Teachers
Association, the American Association for the Advancement of Science,
the National Research Council and Achieve. See NY Times story below.

The standards blend three
dimensions: Practices, Crosscutting Concepts, and Disciplinary Core
Ideas. "The Next Generation Science Standards are going to pull together
inquiry and practice, and recognize the role of engineering. Pulling together
the cross-cutting concepts is going to be a challenge, but it's really
effective pedagogy," said Ellen Ebert, Washington State's Director
of Science for Teaching and Learning at the Office of the Superintendent
of Public Instruction. Thornburg, who was one of the reviewers, says that
inquiry-driven PBL will be the only effective pedagogy for successful
student learning and implementation of the NGSS standards. I agree.

To assist teachers Thornburg and colleagues Norma Thornburg and Sara Armstrong
have produced a terrific set of video-based inquiry starters across the
curriculum, what some of us call video entry documents for project-based
learning. The collection is called Knights
of Knowledge. You can see exemplars at http://knights-of-knowledge.com/projects.html.
They also provide a workshop
to help teachers understand how to launch effective projects. These video
starters cover all curriculum areas, but have a special focus on STEM.

April 9, 2013
New Guidelines Call for Broad Changes in Science Education
By JUSTIN GILLIS, New York Times
New standards for curriculum, which at least 26 states have pledged to
consider, take a firm stand on climate change and evolution and emphasize
hands-on learning.

Educators unveiled new guidelines on Tuesday that call for sweeping changes
in the way science is taught in the United States  including, for
the first time, a recommendation that climate change be taught as early
as middle school.

The guidelines also take a firm stand that children must learn about
evolution, the central organizing idea in the biological sciences for
more than a century, but one that still provokes a backlash among some
religious conservatives.

The guidelines, known as the Next Generation Science Standards, are the
first broad national recommendations for science instruction since 1996.
They were developed by a consortium of 26 state governments and several
groups representing scientists and teachers.

States are not required to adopt them, but 26 states have committed to
seriously considering the guidelines. They include Arizona, Arkansas,
California, Iowa, Kansas and New York. Other states could also adopt the
standards.

Educators involved in drawing them up said the guidelines were intended
to combat widespread scientific ignorance, to standardize teaching among
states, and to raise the number of high school graduates who choose scientific
and technical majors in college, a critical issue for the countrys
economic future.

The focus would be helping students become more intelligent science consumers
by learning how scientific work is done: how ideas are developed and tested,
what counts as strong or weak evidence, and how insights from many disciplines
fit together into a coherent picture of the world.

Leaders of the effort said that teachers may well wind up covering fewer
subjects, but digging more deeply into the ones they do cover. In some
cases, traditional classes like biology and chemistry may disappear entirely
from high schools, replaced by courses that use a case-study method to
teach science in a more holistic way.

In many respects, the standards are meant to do for science what a separate
set of guidelines known as the Common Core is supposed to do for English
and mathematics: impose and raise standards, with a focus on critical
thinking and primary investigation. To date, 45 states and Washington
have adopted the Common Core standards.

This is a huge deal, said David L. Evans, the executive director
of the National Science Teachers Association. We depend on science
in so many aspects of our lives. Theres a strong feeling that we
need to help people understand the nature of science itself, as an intellectual
pursuit.

The climate and evolution standards are just two aspects of a set of
guidelines containing hundreds of new ideas on how to teach science. But
they have already drawn hostile commentary from conservative groups critical
of mainstream scientific thinking.

For instance, as the standards were being drafted, a group called Citizens
for Objective Public Education, which lists officers in Florida and Kansas,
distributed a nine-page letter attacking them. It warned that the standards
ignored evidence against evolution, promoted secular humanism,
and threatened to take away the right of parents to direct the religious
education of their children.

In many states, extensive scientific instruction does not begin until
high school. The guidelines call for injecting far more science into the
middle grades, with climate change being one among many topics. In high
school, students would learn in more detail about the human role in generating
emissions that are altering the planetary climate.

While thousands of schools in the United States already teach climate
change to some degree, they are usually doing it voluntarily, and often
in environmental studies classes. In many more schools, the subject does
not come up because students are not offered those specialized courses,
and state guidelines typically do not require that the issue be raised
in traditional biology or chemistry classes.

Advocates of climate literacy hailed the new standards, saying they could
fill a critical gap in public awareness.

Quite simply, students have a right to know about climate science
and solutions, said Sarah Shanley Hope, the executive director of
the Alliance for Climate Education, which offers one-day programs in schools.

Many states are expected to adopt the guidelines over the next year or
two, but it could be several years before the guidelines are translated
into detailed curriculum documents, teachers are trained in the material
and standardized tests are revised.

And all of this has to happen at a time when state education departments
and many local schools are under severe financial strain. Inevitably,
educators said, some states will do it better than others.

The other states that helped draw up the guidelines were Delaware, Georgia,
Illinois, Kentucky, Maine, Maryland, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota,
Montana, New Jersey, North Carolina, Ohio, Oregon, Rhode Island, South
Dakota, Tennessee, Vermont, Washington and West Virginia. The organizations
included the National Science Teachers Association, the American Association
for the Advancement of Science, the National Research Council and Achieve,
a nonprofit education group that helped develop the earlier common standards
in mathematics and English. Financing was provided by private foundations,
including the Carnegie Corporation of New York, the Noyce Foundation and
the Cisco Foundation, as well as DuPont.

Outlining how the standards might change science classrooms, educators
said they foresaw more use of real-world examples, like taking students
to a farm or fish hatchery  perhaps repeatedly, over the course
of years  to help them learn principles from biology, chemistry
and physics.

Educators want to introduce students to topics that can be made comprehensible
only by drawing on the ideas and methods of many scientific disciplines,
one of the reasons climate change and other large-scale environmental
problems are seen as holding so much potential in the classroom.

Some teachers are already ahead of the curve.

Judith Luber-Narod, a high-school science teacher at the Abby Kelley
Foster Charter Public School in Worcester, Mass., has incorporated climate
change into her environmental studies classes, even though she teaches
in a somewhat conservative area.

I hesitated a little bit talking about something controversial,
she said. But then I thought, how can you teach the environment
without talking about it?

Her students, on the other hand, love topics some deem controversial,
she said. She devised an experiment in which she set up two terrariums
with thermometers and then increased the level of carbon dioxide, the
main greenhouse gas, in one of them.

The students watched as that terrarium got several degrees hotter than
the other.

I say to them, Im here to show you the evidence,
 she said.  If you want to believe the evidence when
were done, thats up to you. 